How Old Does Your Brain Feel?
How old you feel makes a difference in how you think your brain is working, especially for women. And once again, mood and self-efficacy make a difference for everyone in what they think is going on with their brains.
An interesting research study in this month’s Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences looks at what people think about their mental abilities and how old they feel. Researchers Schaefer and Schippee at Purdue University asked people how they felt about their thinking and memory as they got older with questions like “As I get older, my mental sharpness is bound to get worse.” They also asked people in their study how old they actually felt.
Then they looked at how well these persons’ actual ages and how old they actually feel predicted what they thought about how their minds would work as they get older. For women, both their actual and their perceived ages predicted what they thought about how their mental abilities would change over time. For men, neither perceived nor actual age made a difference, but their physical health did. Men who said their physical health was worse were also more pessimistic about their mental abilities.
For both groups, mood and self-efficacy were significantly related to what they thought about their mental abilities over time. This once again emphasizes how important mood and a feeling of being able to control things is for how you feel about your brain’s functioning.
The authors note that their results may have been affected by their sample size, but they raise the possibility that men and women may view their mental abilities differently as they get older. Women’s perceptions of their age seem more important for how they feel about their mental aging, while for men their physical health might be an index of how they view it. For both groups, self-efficacy and mood are important.
Reference:
Schafer MK, Shippee TP. (2010). Age identity, gender, and perceptions of decline: Does feeling older lead to pessimistic dispositions about cognitive aging? Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 65B(1), 91-96.
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I saw an interesting blog post yesterday evening on the site of the Huffington Post about the potential benefits of meditation – or at least about what one woman thinks might be the benefits. Priscilla Warner writes about the contrast between Tibetan monks’ apparent calm, evident even on brain scans, and her own anxiety disorder. Ms. Warner says that she suffers from panic disorder, a severe form of anxiety in which a person can have multiple anxiety attacks every day, even in the middle of the night. Her post is titled “I Want the Brain of a Monk” Although most people don’t suffer from anxiety this severe, many people have symptoms of anxiety. And research has consistently shown that higher levels of anxiety are related to more memory problems.
What’s the relation to brain fitness? In my brain fitness class, I often mention the usefulness of meditation in helping reduce stress and anxiety, both of which have negative effects on memory. You don’t have to go to Tibet to get the benefits of meditation. If you simply take 10 minutes several times a day to break in to the ongoing rush of getting things done, you’ve made a start. Use those 10 minutes to sit quietly, relax your muscles, and breathe deeply.
If you do that every day for two weeks, I think you’ll notice that you feel calmer and better able to focus. And if you’re better able to focus, you will be better able to pay attention and remember things.
Although many people are excited about the potential for using computers to train their brains, we shouldn’t forget that other techniques have been used to the train the brain for many centuries. I’m thinking about the large number of techniques for meditation. While free computer software still requires an investment in a computer, meditation only asks you to sit or lie quietly and focus your mind.
A recently-published study shows parts of the brain in long-term meditators are larger than the same parts of the brain in people who don’t meditate. The article by Eileen Luders and her colleagues appeared in a recent issue of the journal Neuroimage (Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 672-678, April 15, 2009). The study showed that portions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus were larger in persons who had been regular meditators for 5 or more years. The study is interesting because the parts of the brain that were larger are often thought to be important in helping people keep themselves emotionally balanced.
A number of strategies are likely to be helpful for meditators. There has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in mindfulness meditation. Researchers have studied how it can be used in reducing anxiety and depression. Mindfulness is based on Buddhist meditation (for a brief article, click here) but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice meditation. In fact, one of the most important persons who has promoted mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. You can see a video presentation by him on YouTube by clicking here.
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